#thomas lear

Liberty Squad deployed north over the weekend, and after the structure shoots in Tribute our FCs were clearly looking for some blood.  From the moment we arrived at our new staging in Frarie we were out trying to provoke a fight with Snuffed Out and their local allies.

It started with some reinforcement timers in Frarie.  We have citadels there and so do they.  But when, on Sunday evening they declined to show up for one of them after we had formed, Thomas Lear and Cainun led us out to Sujarento, about 8 gates away, to reinforce a faction Fortizar owned by one of Snuff’s allies Pen Is Out.

They gunned the Fortizar for that, which made it a busy time for our logi wing as our Abaddon fleet set the first timer.

Hanging around the Fortizar

With the timer set to come out in less than 24 hours we had effectively scheduled the next big op, all while only losing a single Augoror.  Of course, then we lost five Abaddons on the way home because the locals formed a small fleet to catch stragglers and we apparently cannot all align.  You cannot spell “Abaddon” without “bad” I guess.

You don’t tell me where to align!

Anyway, the blood lust was on us.  Pings went out to get people on.  We were going to take this fight.  And, the next evening, at 23:00 UTC, we were piling into fleet while it was reported that the Snuff and allies had about 200 people logged into their staging system.

Low sec still has local.

Once we got a pile of Abaddons together, along with some Leshaks, Cainun had us undock.  The call was for battleships ahead of logi, so I left my filthy Guardian in the hangar and went with the fat boys.  I trained up lasers ages ago so I like to use them when I get the chance.  So pretty.

An Abaddon blob undocking

We had battleships together, which were bridged in a group to the target, and dread alts on standby, logged in, in the fleet, and insurance windows open, ready to go if the fight escalated as we expected it might.

When we arrived we aligned to the target, which had already begun its 15 minute repair cycle.

The Pen Is Out Fortizar

Snuff had a Machariel fleet waiting for us, which was what we had hoped to get stuck into.  We got on grid… maybe a little too close, since we the station PDS was hitting us… and the Leshaks began hitting the Fortizar while the Abaddons began engaging the Machs.  That was a fairly busy time, especially for our logi wing again.  But even in the Abaddons there was much to do, including capacitor management.  The fit isn’t cap stable and when the station is throwing void bombs at you that drain your cap… cap you need to fire the guns and keep your hardeners going… you spend some time feeding in cap boosters and turning things on and off just to get another shot in.

We were exchanging when my turn came up to be primary.  Logi was busy so many of us were letting our armor sit unrepaired until it got critical, so when I saw the yellow boxes light up on my overview it seemed unlikely that I would get enough reps in time.

Sure enough, my ship exploded.

I was floating around in my pod, nobody had time for me at the moment, when Snuff began jumping dreadnoughts into the fight.  As soon as that happened Thomas called for our dreads to insure and undock.  I swapped windows, dragging my main over to the second monitor and my alt onto the main, and undocked the Naglfar.  We jumped into the fight, sieged up, and began hitting targets.

I think was the third time I had used a dread in combat, which pretty much means I had little idea what I needed to do beyond going into siege and shooting the broadcasts… and hitting the emergency hull energized when I became primary.

You know how this ends… Fortizar visible in the background

By the time my number came up Snuff had dropped titans on us.  I lasted long enough that I had a titan on my kill mail.  That might be another first for me.  The hull energizer kept me alive for a little bit longer, which may have saved somebody else as people had to keep shooting me for a bit.

After that I was sitting around in system in two pods.  At that point I realized that my main actually had implants and that maybe I shouldn’t let him just sit around.  I gated him safely home to our staging.

My alt was implant free however, so he stuck around on grid taking screen shots of the unfolding fight, some of which I put in a gallery at the end of the post.

Once the titans were on grid the battle was decided.  Dreadnoughts were as far as we could escalate, so after a few more targets people who could jump out did.

By any reasonable measure, we lost the fight.  We failed the objective, lost more ships, lost more in ISK value.  But it was the battle we had been aching for.  I, for one, had been dragging that Naglfar around with me since March waiting to drop it into a desperate fight.

I tried to do a battle report, but as I always say, low sec is strange.  Low sec groups can be as clannish as any null sec coalition, so it is difficult to tell who was there with Snuff and who was just there, so I sorted the header into Imperium and everybody else.

Battle Report Header – Click to Make Legible

That was a lot of people in system during the fight.  Enough to help make Sujarento the most violent system in the last 24 hours per DOTLAN.

Most Violent Winner of the Night

And lest you wonder, the vast majority of that violence occurred during a pretty tight time frame.

That peak, that is us

However, despite the pile up of players in system over a short duration, there was no time dilation invoked that I saw.  Maybe somebody had the foresight to reinforce the system.  There have been times in low sec where just gating a group of 60 ships have brought tidi into play.

Anyway, we have introduced ourselves to the locals by throwing them a nice party.  We’ll see how things develop from there.

Related Items

Cainun’s AAR on Reddit

Gallery of screen shots from the battle

Selected screen shots from my pod.  Click on the pictures to enlarge.

An explosion over the Fortizar as Titans loll about

A doomsday reaches out for a Naglfar

That Naglfar brewing up from a second doomsday as a Rev flares up in the background

Explosions and wrecks on the field

A dread explodes in the middle of the pack

Explosions so bright they out shine the stars

The Other Keepstar Falls in Rage

One one Keepstar awaited in wormhole J115405.  Named “Unassailable Wealth,” the Initiative had been in the night before to get it to the final timer.

Unassailable Wealth waits to be assailed

That was the last big target in the hole known to some as “Rage,” the final loot pinata to smack, and its timer was running down, set to end just after the transition to December 15th on the UTC clock that EV…

An Astrahus Dies in Hakonen

And it wasn’t even ours. Despite not having anything major going on this past weekend I somehow managed to sit down at my computer 30 minutes after a fleet op had formed up and left.  So it goes in New Eden, where action operates on its own schedule, and if you’re not around you miss it. But as the weekend drew to a close I managed to get into one fleet.  Thomas Lear pinged for a Typhoon fleet…

I Survive My First Capital Op

While Burn Jita was still raging on Saturday afternoon, I was back in Delve and going out on my first real Cap Fleet operation. I have formed up a couple of times for operations that never went anywhere, and I went on last week’s training on SiSi, the public test server, but those don’t really count.  But yesterday I happened to be sitting down at my computer just in time to see a ping from…

Tuesday afternoon a ping had gone out to Reavers asking who had ship ready for a new doctrine.  It turned out we had enough people ready and a ping went out for a “short” op that evening.  It was time to get out our Sleipnir doctrine.

Sleipnir riding through a fleet boost burst

The word “short” used in reference to a fleet op in EVE Online is generally deceptive.  There can be short ops, especially if they are homeland defense ops where you are chasing off enemies already near your staging.  But for an offensive operation where you are going to travel somewhere and shoot something or somebody, you should probably block out three hours for the whole thing.  It might take less, but these things have a way of stretching out.

For our op, getting close to our destination was easy as Thomas Lear had a wormhole connection setup for us.  As somebody noted, we were playing at PL, flying a command ship doctrine and traveling by wormholes.  Our destination was the system E-YJ8G in the Catch region, where we were going to help Volition Cult take down an Astrahus that Honorable Third Party had anchored in their space. (We crashed a node in that system about three years ago, back during the drone assist days!)

With the wormhole path, which started just one jump from our staging, the ride out was quick.  However, the wormholes shrank as we went through, indicating that they might not be able to accommodate us for the return trip.  But there is no point in worrying about that on the trip out.  The whole thing might be a trap so we could be going home the fast way in any case.

When we got there we found an Astrahus already under fire from our temporary allies in the fight and a POS with carriers and faxes in it on the same grid, though about 900km off the citadel.  The capital ships were sitting off in the POS with fighters deployed, and were the juicer target.  So Thomas led us to the POS to see if we could catch a capital kill.

Our foes in HTP were no fools, as their carriers and support were close to the POS shields.  In order to get a kill we were going to have to bump one of the carriers away from the shields and fax support.  That takes a bit of skill, a department in which we proved lacking for a bit.  We failed on a Nyx and a couple more before we managed to get a Nidhoggur away from the pack.

Nidhoggur out on its own

We managed to kill that, which gave us a warm feeling, until we realized that we had lost a couple of Sleipners along the way.  Sleips are expensive ships and we don’t have to lose too many in order to balance out the ISK value of a carrier.

We took a run at another target, but it didn’t look like it was going to happen, so Thomas had us pull range on the POS and we contented ourselves with killing their fighters.  That was what we ended up doing for a stretch.

We warped over to the Astrahus and put drones on that to keep it ticking down to destruction, then continued working on fighters.  We did warp back to try and get another carrier that looked like it was straying from the POS bubble, but that did not pan out.  Then it was back to work on fighters and the Astrahus kill.

All in all a decent little fight which yielded a “we all had fun” thread on Reddit which seemed to have gotten ignore by the usual hate crowd.  Or maybe I’ve just blocked all the Rob Kaichin’s there finally.  The battle report is a little wonky… fighters get counted as kills, but only if you take out a whole squadron of them… but it was generally a pretty even outcome and both sides got to kill a few expensive thinks without taking huge relative losses.

Null sec working as designed.

Of course, then we had to go home.

Thomas said that anybody who cared to could zip back to the wormhole, but it was not at all clear if it would stay up long enough to allow the whole fleet to pass, even with some losses, so he was going to lead people home the long way.  He had us set our destination to Keberz and let us off the leash to free burn.  I must have heard him first because when the fleet got tangled with some locals in ERVK-P, I was already at the gate two jumps down the road.  After some “stay where you are” and “jump back in” over coms, I decided to just wander on down the line, stopping in HED-GP.

HED-GP is one of those border system, this one representing a direct transition from high sec to null sec, which are natural choke points if you want to set up a gate camp to zap passers by.  The system, as expected, had a small crowd.  After trying to bounce off of a celestial… no corp tactical bookmarks in the system… and finding that blocked by a drag bubble, I warped off and safed up to wait for the fleet to catch up.

I wasn’t really watching local… I tend to have it as narrow as possible so I can just see a total number and a compact list of names… so I didn’t notice that the people in the system were asking after me.  I eventually got two private convo request from what turned out to be the tow groups squaring off around the gate.

One was from MIC Improvise, who was with the group who had just been at the Astrahus fight earlier and who kindly gave me a celestial to bounce off to get cleanly through the gate.  I assume it was legit, though you never know, and our temp truce for the fight was over.  But the fleet had unstuck itself from whatever it had been doing back in ERVK-P and was closing in on the system, so I opted just to move with them.

The other was from Madmatt Otsito, a local give his corp name (HED Hunters) who seemed to want me to join up with his group to fight the other group around the gate.  I think.  Voice coms were busy.  I let him know that the gate would probably be hot in a bit as a couple dozen more Sleipners were on their way.

The I warped to our in gate in HED-GP and rejoined the fleet as they jumped into the system.  I am sure everybody could see local more than double and when we warped to a perch over the Keberz gate, most of the people on grid thought it was about the right time to get the hell out of the way and warped.  As we landed on the gate, somebody called a Harpy that was in range and that got quickly blapped.  Then somebody pointed out that there was a Cormorant at the extreme edge of lock range.  I happened to already have long range ammo loaded, so I locked him up and took a shot.

And that is how I got on Madmatt Otsito’s kill mail.  Ah well.  I didn’t even hit him, but I had projectiles down range for him.

From there we were off to Queious and the route back to Delve and the jump bridge network.  The route was quiet so aside from a side trip to kill an ESS, we made our way back to staging and called it a night.  Another small op, no tidi, no drama, just a good clean fight.

Some screen shots from the op:

Sleipnirs around the POS

Sleipnir riding through a fleet boost burst

Nidhoggur out on its own

Nidhoggur on fire

And it explodes

The Astrahus brewing up

And it blows up as well

Turnout wasn’t bad for an op called in the later USTZ and which had a parallel capital operation running at the same time.  We didn’t fill the fleet, but our number was well over 200.  I was going to grab an Abaddon… Bhaalgorns are cool, but they are also half a billion ISK and I like to let a doctrine settle down and become a standard before I invest that much ISK… but I was late to the market.  All the Abaddons had been bought out.  But that was okay, as the doctrine used the same logi fits for Oneiros and Guardians as our other armor doctrines, so I was able to pull out a Oneiros and join in.

The Bhaalgorns, being a Blood Raiders faction ship, naturally has the Blood Raiders style paint job.  And a skin of the same style for the Abaddon was part of a past event so was pretty readily available, so a number of pilots were able to match up.

Hanging on the Fortizar waiting to go

The Oneiros needs a decent skin.  There are three available from CCP, but they all turn a mostly dark colored ship into a slightly different but mostly indistinguishable dark colored ship.  There isn’t even a Quafe skin for the Oneiros.  It needs something bright and shiny.  Gallente Problems.

The fleet’s destination was Fountain, to face The-Culture and assail their holdings in the region, with Asher getting the honor of leading the new fleet doctrine for its first run.

Going to Fountain always brings back memories of the Fountain War.  So many systems there bring back memories of events now three years gone. (A summary of my posts from the war here.)  It was also a time when I was very active and always flew in main fleet.

Of course, being in main fleet again reminded me of the downsides of being there.  It wasn’t horrible… often it was unintentionally funny to me… but after a long stretch of smaller fleets and my time in Reavers, it was chaotic coms and me thinking “Can you just shut up?” as people ran off at the mouth about unrelated items.  I tend to be very good at coms discipline and take it seriously, and when you get 200+ people together… more than that because the battleships were sharing coms with the capital fleet… there is always somebody who picks the wrong time to start talking.

The-Culture put out a fleet of Ishtars to oppose us at one point, but things were not in their favor and they withdrew that after a while, content to just harasses us with interdictors when they could.  The counter to this in our new doctrine is smart bombs.  Each of the Bhaalgorns was fit with a smart bomb, a weapon that shoots out a burst that hits anything within a limited radius of your ship, friend or foe.

This led to more unintentional comedy.

There is a joke that is not really a joke wherein one says, “Did he say jump?” when holding on a gate.  When everybody is there waiting for the word, just saying the word “jump” even in the sentence “Do not jump!” will cause some people to hit the button and go through the gate.  Everybody is hanging on, waiting for that one word and sometime they won’t process the context until after they have acted.

Well, having smart bombs on our shiny new doctrine ships seemed to end up with the same sort of thing, wherein any time somebody used the words “smart bomb” the Bhaalgorns would start lighting them off, even when those words were embedded in the phrase, “Will you stop using your fucking smart bombs!”

Did you say “smart bomb?”

I am not sure if we killed any of our own that way, but small stuff had to get the hell away from the Bhaalgorns, everybody had their shields stripped away, and logi spent some time running armor reps to repair this self-inflicted damage.

Once the enemy Ishtar fleet retired, our job of covering the capital fleet left us chasing around various interdictors who were trying to bubble us and the capitals just to make everything go slower for us.  As part of that I got to watch one of our pilots in a command destroyer use that ships special AOE micro jump drive to “boosh” interdictor bubbles off of the fleet. (“Boosh” is the term of art for using that drive.)

The micro jump drive spinning up to boosh a bubble

This actually seemed to work pretty well, given that it takes a bit of skill as the pilot must align and time their jump to get things done right.  Only once did things go awry, when a bunch of us who had gotten out of a bubble by turning our prop mods on had the bubble dropped on us a while later.  At least it was off the capital ships.

As the op began to reach its conclusion, we met some of the capitals at one of The-Culture’s POSes where they were building capitals.

Prime Targets

The tower was but into its reinforced state as we arrived, but the subcaps joined in to take care of some of the modules, especially the jump bridge array.  First we shot it until it was past shields and armor and into structure.

Shooting the jump bridge

Then it was time for logi to rep the armor back up to half full.  We could have destroyed it, but then it would just take a couple guys about 30 minutes to drop a new one.  Left as it was, they would have to either destroy it… which would mean burning down through half armor and structure… or repair it… which would mean repping up from half armor and structure.

This is what is know as a “dick move” designed to cause the enemy the maximum amount of inconvenience.

We also knocked out a couple of faction modules they had on the POS.  Then, as we waited for the caps for form up and get on their way, we shot Thomas Lear in his Damnation, just to see how tough that command ship really was.  Then we set ourselves to shepherding the capitals back to Delve.  Once they were within range to jump back to their staging, we were released to burn home ourselves.

The fleet ran past the three hour mark and was a reminder of the ups and downs of being in main fleet.  Now a bunch of timers have been set in Fountain though, so main fleet will be returning soon to contest them.

Hanging on the Fortizar waiting to go

Bhaalgorns and Abaddons in warp

Did you say “smart bomb?”

More comedy as we bubble ourselves on a gate

More smart bombs

Prime Targets

Shooting the jump bridge

Closer in on the jump bridge

A Bhaalgorn using its lasers

Shooting a faction module

Shooting Thomas Lear

Thomas webbed but getting reps

That is a titan’s worth of ISK in structure form…

And now it is Tuesday and I haven’t written any more about it, so I thought it might retrace what happened, or at least my own path through it.

If you are a regular on /r/eve you have likely read the story already and can probably skip this, as it will be a subset of events, mostly what I actually saw and heard.  If you live in New Eden vicariously through my posts, well, here is another tale from deep space.

Thursday night there was a ping for a Cerberus fleet led by Asher Elias.  This is a very Asher doctrine and I try to go on such fleets whenever I can.  They tend to be a good time.  I logged on and got into the fleet.

We had some special instructions.  One was to bring along a medium mobile war disruption bubble if we could deploy it.  The other was to bring along some extra ammo.  I bought a bubble and put it in my cargo along with some cheap t1 missiles, as it sounded like we might be shooting structures.  Then we undocked.  We had decent numbers, with over 200 in fleet, so there was a mass of Cerbs.

Cerberus undock

From there in Saranen we headed out a few jumps to catch a titan bridge into Pure Blind.  From there we headed through Fade and into Deklein, with our destination being the system 2O9G-D.

It was there that we saw, on the grid with the station, the Keepstar going up.  It was still early in its 24 hour deployment cycle, so I figured we were there to lay some groundwork in order to contest it once it came out of its deployment and spent an hour going online, during which it could not defend itself.

And that seemed to be our task.  First we went and dropped our bubbles around the station in order to making coming and going from there in anything besides an interceptor a chore.

2O9G station bubbled up

We went and hit the POS in the system that had a cyno beacon and a jump bridge module in order to hinder comings and goings.  We also covered the deployment of a pair of POS towers and spent some time popping hostile warp bubbles around an Astrahus in I30-3A, which is the system next door.

Not much happened while we did this in the way of fights.  We killed a couple of bombers who tried to hit us, some interceptors that we buzzing around, and a couple of fighters sent out from a carrier.

During this The Mittani got on coms with us to tell us about the grand plan.  He said that we were not there merely to shoot the Keepstar, but to hellcamp the station through the 96 hour period it would take to turn the ownership over to us, thus locking down all the assets held therein by the locals.  We would also be there for the Keepstar fight, but the hellcamp was the thing.

A hellcamp is when you bubble up a null sec station and put a fleet on it to halt all but the most minimal comings and goings… you can’t really stop interceptors… for an extended period of time.  In this case, we The Mittani was talking about embargoing the station for 96 hours straight.  Not the longest hellcamp in my time… I think we spent at least a week camping a station in 319-3D in Delve back in 2012… but still a call for a commitment.

To do this Asher was going to take us back to Saranen and swap out for a Confessor fleet.  Those of us who didn’t want to stay up for the hellcamp… there were late night Euros in the fleet as well as early risers like me… we could safe log out in the POS and log back in the next day for the big fight and whatever else came up.

There was also the promise of a State of the Goonion announcement come the morning.

It wasn’t really that late, but I didn’t want to fly to Saranen and back out again, so I decided to call it a night and camp in the POS.  I was already planning to work from home on Friday and I figured if I camped in the POS I could log in to see a bit of the big fight… it was slated for about noon my time, so perfect for a lunch break diversion… and then figure things out from there.  So I left.

I do not know what happened with the hellcamp plan overnight, but when I finally got around to logging in the next day before lunch, 2O9G was starting to fill up.  There were already over 1,400 people in local.  Unfortunately for us, only about 20 of them were blue, and most were orbiting the stick in the now reinforced POS that had been setup the previous night.

As local climbed to 2,000 and time dilation started to kick in even without anybody fighting, the word came down through Jabber that there was not going to be a fight as there was no way we could kill the Keepstar in time.

Apparently, when time dilation kicks in and slows everybody down, one of the things that is unaffected is the timer to online a citadel.  Somebody had calculated that even without hostile interference, so long as tidi was running, we could not put enough sustained DPS on the Keepstar to keep it vulnerable and kill it before its unaffected timer ran down and it went online.

And, of course, hostile interference was going to be a big deal.  With about 2,000 people on grid with the Keepstar, including supers, we would be going in outnumbered, so that even without the tidi hitch the Keepstar seemed safe.

The calculations by the heads of the Imperium seemed to include an assumption that the MBC wouldn’t form back up as a single unit again to defend a single citadel, or even that PL might join in to get on a Keepstar kill.  They seem happy enough to shoot MBC capitals of late.

Instead, once again, the MBC showed itself to be the CFC 2.0, a massive essentially blue coalition holding the north together.  Protest all you like, but actions speak louder than words.  Even PL was able to get in on the act thanks to a suspiciously convenient wormhole connection opening up between Thera and 2O9G before the fight.

https://twitter.com/CCPLGames/status/751488918902546432

But no fight was coming.  Some people who were keen to stream the event… including TMC… clearly felt led astray.

Instead, the Imperium undocked a couple of battleship fleets to shoot structured in Pure Blind.  Those of us per-positioned in 2O9G were feeling a little lost.  I safe logged again and went back to work.

Fortunately for me, that evening Thomas Lear came out with a fleet to rescue some of us that were stuck in 2O9G.  He got us back to a titan that bridged us close to Saranen.

Another titan bridge

Finally, on Saturday, during the usual Meta Show time frame, there was the previously promised State of the Goonion.  There is a summary of it over at TMC, but the essence was that the plan didn’t work and we were going to pursue a more modest/methodical approach to the long promised reconquista.  We would be pushing into Pure Blind from Saranen, taking systems in the first two constellations, the one based around 93PI-4 and the one next to it, referred to as “the kite” due to its shape on the DOTLAN map, defending the timers and raising ADMs on the systems to make them more defensible.

There was also some announcements about doctrines that would be used going forward.  We had quite a few doctrines live up until this point.  Reducing that will make supply easier, though now I am stuck with two Naga battlecruisers I never got to fly.  I will either ship them back to Jita myself or go do a long range camp on a gate or something with them until they die.

Caps to be used going forward were discussed, and since only the Caldari and Amarr force auxiliaries are going to be used/reimbursed going forward, a few people undocked their insured Ninazu’s for us to shoot.  I got one one kill mail just to be there.

Then it was off to raising ADMs, which means raising the Military and Industrial indexes, which in turn means killing rats and mining.  So after the SotG I joined up with Jay Amazingness’ mining op and broke rocks in 93PI-4 in a Procurer.

Rock crushing in a Procurer

And that is the plan for now.  We have secured the constellations in Pure Blind.

Pure Blind – July 11, 2016

Now we have to see if we can hold them, raise the ADMs, and push forward.  Deklein is always the goal on the horizon, the Goon homeland for many years.

Gevlon says it won’t work.  And certainly, if the MBC continues to work together and applies itself again to sov warfare, we are likely to be pushed back to the soda warehouse in Saranen.  We shall see how this turns out, this next stage in the war for us.

I am kind of disappointed that I didn’t get to see the Keepstar after it was deployed.  I might have to sneak out to take a look at some point.

Meanwhile, some screen shots from the events of the last few days put together into a gallery.

Cerberus undock

Cerbs spreading out

Looks like it has about 18 hours to go…

2O9G station bubbled up

The bubble Astrahus in I30-3A

Shooting a jump bridge module

Another titan bridge

Nymblar’s Ninzu blows up

An Astrahus in 93PI-4

Rock crushing in a Procurer

Expecting another run with Nagas again, I logged into EVE Online early to grab two off of the contracts available in Saranen.  There seemed to be plenty available, so somebody had worked to restock the market over night.  Pick your favorite quote about logistics and war. But when the ping went out to form up for the 02:00 op, the call was for Hurricanes alone.  No Nagas would undock, so I had to…